The question

What is your worst intellectual habit?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Tim Harford

Economics columnist at the Financial Times

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I probably want to be liked too much. This is one difference between me and Steve Levitt . Steve Levitt is also much smarter than me and much more successful than me. And that doesn’t bother me at all, but he said he also doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him, or doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks about him. I actually do care what people think about me. I’d quite like people to think I’m a nice guy, so I’m probably self-censoring at times. Say, maybe I won’t say that because people wouldn’t like that. And that’s probably a fault in a newspaper columnist — you probably shouldn’t care what people think about you, but that’s the way it is.

Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler podcast, published transcript source ↗

Others on this question

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009
Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw Founder and executive chairperson of Biocon
I introspect a lot and keep asking myself questions on what is right and wrong.
Recorded Dr. Pritam Singh and Dr. Asha Bhandarker, People Matters, 15 March 2011 source ↗
Adam Gopnik Staff writer at The New Yorker; essayist
My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 16 September 2017 source ↗
Alan Shepard Naval aviator and astronaut; the first American in space and the fifth person to walk on the Moon
A little bit of overconfidence perhaps. A lack of attention to duty. Little insidious things that happened. You had this great team of dedicated, qualified people, but they get a little bit complacent, and boom! Pretty soon something goes wrong.
Recorded Houston, Texas, Academy of Achievement, 1 February 1991 source ↗

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